


as real as a wolf's teeth, or a wolf's smile

by mustntgetmy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Autumn, Gaslighting, M/M, Mental Health Issues, werewolves are real but wizards aren't
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:47:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27665621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustntgetmy/pseuds/mustntgetmy
Summary: Non-magic, modern AU wherein Grimmauld Place is still a home to be escaped, Sirius can't trust his own mind, and there are terrible and wonderful things in the woods.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 11
Kudos: 53
Collections: Wolfstar Games 2020





	as real as a wolf's teeth, or a wolf's smile

**Author's Note:**

> Team Sight  
> Prompt: T3  
> "Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." - Anton Chekhov
> 
> Warnings: This fic has intense and explicit description of gaslighting/parental abuse, plus description of steps towards recovery from said abuse. There is also mention (but not explicit description) of the violent death of an animal, plus a briefly described fight in which a werewolf gets injured. Additional warnings for brief mention of excessive drug use, drinking, and some cursing.

When Sirius woke – his blankets tossed halfway across the room, as if carried away by storm winds, his heartbeat thunder in his ear – it was only midnight. He stared at the time on his phone, as affronted as if reading a prolonged and personal insult. “ _Fuck you_ ,” he hissed at last when his phone blinkered off, but without much conviction. In the enclosing dark of his new room it was hard to feel anything approaching steadiness; to his sleep-soaked mind it all felt _wrong_ : the walls too far away, the bed too soft to hold him upright, the air too clear, unclouded by either scent or noise. For an unbelievably long half minute he found himself missing Grimmauld Place – actually _missing_ it! – before he caught himself and gave himself a hard shake. It was the lack of city noise, it was the absence of light pollution, and the way he couldn’t sleep because of it; that was all this was. That was all it could be. Because if he was actually sitting here missing Grimmauld Place then he was more well and truly fucked up than he’d thought.

Swearing at himself – at the part of his mind that had dared to miss that house, and at the part of his mind that refused to let him sleep – he got up, meaning to retrieve his blankets from where he’d kicked them across the room. But he hadn’t taken more than two steps before the nightmare that had woken him crashed in on him again – the oppressive tightness of a too clean room, heavy with the scent of antiseptic – and without thinking he turned to the window and flung back the curtains. He was expecting only other shades of darkness on the other side of the glass, was grasping through the curtains, really, just for the latch and the relief of cool air, and so he was surprised when light poured in, bright and bracing as a winter’s first snow, and just as silvery white. He stared, wide-eyed, his head tipping back and his lips parting, as if he could drink that light in. He thought at once of shaved ice – feather light on his tongue and perfectly sweet – and the back hand slap of vodka, and somehow the combination calmed him. So much so that he didn’t see that he was being watched.

But he felt it, the most primordial part of his brain prickling, sending shivers out along his skin. His first instinct was to search the shadows, to see if there was something – someone – in his room with him. He was convinced he would see something there, a rat at the very least, and when there wasn’t so much as an antique doll eerily eyeballing him from a high shelf he turned back to the window feeling the familiar creep of doubt, and gave only the most cursory of glances to the garden and the trees beyond. He didn’t expect to see anything there; nothing bad in his life had ever come from the outside.

But there were eyes there, just beyond the garden gate: greenish gold eyes, glowing eyes. A wolf’s eyes.

His breath caught somewhere at the base of his throat and he froze, pinned still by those eyes as securely as a butterfly in a specimen case. Trapped in this way, he could see something too incongruous in its stare, something more than his city-slicker’s shock at stumbling across a wild animal in the countryside allowed for. The longer he looked at it the more light-headed he became, and it was not long before he felt the siren’s call of a self-destructive impulse shiver through him. There was no question of refusing or considering it: that was not his nature. And so as always it was as much a shock to him as to anyone else when he did what he did next.

He threw the window open wide, so quickly that the frame bounced and rattled against the outside of the house, and leaning half out of the window he called, low but clearly to the wolf: “Hello, gorgeous! Give us a smile?”

And there, yes there it was, in the echo of his own too bright voice, the thing that had so unnerved him: there was understanding, keen and sharp and _human_ , in the wolf’s eyes. And he was caught in them again, as he might have been caught in the gaze of a friend who saw right through him, until the wolf narrowed his eyes, and with a snort that was clearly meant as dismissal, flicked its tail and walked back into the night.

…

There was muesli waiting for him on the sideboard when he came down just shy of noon, a little china bowl of toast and fruits beside it. A paring knife had been left stabbed into an apple, already half eaten; he pulled it free and sliced away the rest of the fruit from the core, then peeled the two kiwis still left in the basket. When he was done he drizzled honey on the muesli, but otherwise ate it dry, relishing every obnoxiously loud crunch, wiping the back of his mouth with his hand when he drained a glass of orange juice, reveling in the feeling of eating unobserved. In Grimmauld Place each meal was arranged to the minute, with servants in silent attendance along the back wall and the family never deviating from their assigned seats, and the dishes, even at breakfast and lunch, floating in on staggered cues. It was as severe and ritualistic as the opening of a murder trial, and indeed his parents never failed to use the opportunity to enter new evidence of his failings. But here, not a single glare fell on him, not even from the otherwise soberly colored paintings over the fireplace, and the silence, though it was thick, did not hold the oppressive charge of a blow about to fall.

And yet, even though he could see all the ways in which this place was different from the one he’d left – from the visible patina of age on the serving wear to the blithely mismatched curtains – he still felt the muscles in his back tighten to the point of a cramp when a brisk voice rang out from the other room, “Sirius! Sirius, come in here!”

Unable to set down his muesli bowl because his fingers had clamped too tightly around it, he walked stiff-legged into the study, his galloping heart only slowing when his Uncle Alphard looked up at him from his desk with an absentminded smile and said, “Oh, good, good, you’re here. Hand me that photograph, will you? No, no, the one I’ve left on the loveseat. Yes, that’s it, thank you. I’d have gotten it myself but, you see, all this blood –”

Sirius knew a moment’s queasy shock as Alphard gestured to his desk, on which was laid the mangled corpse of a cat and leaky jars of what he very much hoped was the cat’s blood. But it was not the first time he’d come upon Alphard leaning over a dead animal corpse and, now that he lived with him, it would certainly not be the last, and so the shock passed quickly, so much so that he was able to restart in on his muesli as Alphard got back to work.

“I don’t think I’m the embalmer I used to be, boy,” Alphard sighed, appropriately mournful. “But then, this one’s in especially bad shape. I ought to have said no, but…well, it was Arabella Figg’s and she and I have something of a history.”

He said it so dryly and matter-of-factly that Sirius almost didn’t catch that his uncle was admitting to yet another liaison with one of the village’s widows; he’d name dropped two other women in a similar way in just as many days. He mentioned them, Sirius thought, as a way to explain the overabundance of baked goods in the kitchen (for Alphard, like Sirius’s mother, had never touched so much as the light on an oven) and to indulge in the opportunity for chest puffing Sirius’s presence provided. Sirius didn’t really think much about it; after all who was he, of all people, to judge what went on in his uncle’s bed? So he allowed this remark the discreet smirk it earned – which went unanswered; his uncle was only so much of a scoundrel – and turned his attention back to the poor cat. Looking at it up close made him grimace anew, and this time he did have to set aside his muesli. On the other occasions that Sirius had had to see his uncle at his taxidermy table, the violence worked upon the animals’ bodies had been done primarily by Alphard’s scalpel: the pet falcon and two dogs Sirius had watched his uncle stuff and pose had died of old age, their last breaths taken as their owners’ stroked their backs. But the cat that now laid curled up on the table had not faded peacefully into nothing before a warm hearth fire, or sighed into the gentling touch of its’ widow’s hand. No, this creature had met death violently – wildly. It had fought something, Sirius could tell. There were claw marks down its side.

His hands went tight again around the bowl; an image of green-gold eyes peering up at him appeared, as if through thinning mist, in his mind. Not giving himself time to think better of it he asked, “Was it a wolf?”

His uncle lifted his head from the bloodied fur he was cleaning, blinking slowly.

Sirius cleared his throat and gestured with his chin. “Did a wolf do that?”

His uncle glanced back down at the cat’s curled body, rigid with defensiveness even though its fight was long lost. “Unlikely,” he announced crisply. “There are rarely wolves here this time of year.”

“Rarely?” Sirius whispered back, hating his own voice in that moment, hating how desperate it sounded to his own ears, gripping onto those two syllables as if to the edge of a cliff. What he felt was disproportionate to what was happening, he knew that much logically. But for him, now, logic only went so deep. Self-doubt had rooted in him, and he could feel it creeping through his veins, chill as mist over stones. He knew its source – he could smell it still, antiseptic laid over stale sweat – and that was why he had to cling so desperately to _rarely_. He had been sure he’d seen a wolf last night; he had been sure he could see claw marks on this cat’s flank. But had he trusted perhaps too readily in what his mind was telling him his eyes were seeing? He leaned forward, gripped the edge of the desk tightly, the antiseptic smell flooding him, so keen it was as if he was still there, in the cold halls that scent emanated from. As if he had, in fact, never left them.

He closed his eyes, tried to anchor himself to what he knew was real, to what he could plainly feel: the sting of the fresh paper cut on the pad of his left thumb; the slight, but insistent pressure of a piece of muesli lodged between two of his back teeth; the thinness of the t-shirt was wearing and the way the sweat underneath his arms was already soaking through it. He counted his breaths, the sound of his uncle’s voice washing over him as soundly and impersonally as a wave. This was Alphard’s great gift to Sirius: his ability to talk without expecting the silence between his words to be filled, or minding much if his questions went unanswered. He demanded nothing in his conversation, never paused to ask if Sirius was still listening, or if he was alright. It was for this reason, more than the therapist recommending he live with a relative, that he was here living in Alphard’s house instead of with the Potters. There would be no chance there of silence, of quietly pulling back together what pieces of himself he could.

He tried to do that now: to pull himself back to himself, breath by breath, repeating once again the various things he knew for certain in that moment, opening his eyes by degrees, and letting his uncle’s voice reach him again.

“Of course he was warned,” Alphard was drawling now, fingers sure as he fit a thin colorless thread through the eye of a needle, “not to walk that way through the woods. But you try to tell a Carrow anything, see where that gets you in this village. He was lost in there half the night – there are some bad places to fall out that way, doubly so without any light, but you know he was _warned_ – and came out just before dawn screaming bloody murder. Said he’d been attached by a – a monster, I can’t even describe it, it was so foolish. Anyway, his father and old Macnair went back the next night – guns drawn, hackles raised, you’ve seen them they barely need any excuse – only to discover the fell beast that had scratched up young Carrow: a handful of fox kits and their mum. Well, a vixen will tear a piece out of you to protect her young and make no mistake. I expect that’s how poor Goliath here came to be on my table. Nosing around where he oughtn’t, just like that idiot boy. He had to get a rabies shot, you know.”

“Right,” Sirius said through his teeth. And then, without taking the trouble to hide how impatient he was to get off the subject and indeed far from the body of the cat in general, asked, “D’you need anything else? Or anything from the shops? I’m thinking of heading down that way after I clean up the breakfast things.”

“Oh, don’t trouble yourself with that. Molly can take care of it when she comes to bring supper,” Alphard said, as unperturbed by Sirius’s brusque change of topic as he had been by Sirius not listening to him. “As for the shops I wouldn’t say no to some caramels. But not under any circumstances the soft ones.”

“Hard caramels, got it,” Sirius said, all but bounding out of the study, his skin already going pleasantly itchy at the thought of the front door opening up before him, the fresh air in his face, all that open space he could run and run through if he wanted to. It seemed ages before this yearning wrapped real and brisk and bracing around him (even though he’d done as his uncle suggested and left his dirty bowl of muesli in the sink for the village woman who took care of his uncle’s cooking and cleaning to clear and had only gone up to his room long enough to shove on a (relatively) clean hoodie and his boots) and he sighed up into the low gray sky when it was the only thing hemming in him, and deliberately cut a path through the fallen leaves on the garden grass, feeling the muscles in his back loosen when the only sound that chased him from the house was the low, cooing murmur of a nearby stream.

His uncle’s house sat at the far side of a long lane, all alone where the road knotted in on itself and ended. The closest neighbor they had, not counting the stream and the newly bare branches of the woods, was the village church and its graveyard, where there were stones so old the writing on them was blurred away. The handful of letters left behind transformed the names of the dead and their epitaphs into stark poetry. _Peace Jon, faithful soldier, no more,_ read one. _Here --ah, forget and rest_ , was another. But it was the crooked stone tucked against the boundary wall, the one which now said, only, _beloved mother, kind_ that always made Sirius stop in his tracks and stare. In all his life it would never cease to be a source of amazement to him that those three words could go together.

Through the churchyard and its miniscule parking lot it was only a matter of hopping a rundown fence before meeting the road that led into town. From there the lane was winding, passing what felt like every house in the village before it smoothed and straightened into what was clearly an artfully charming high street.

There, in the shops, he picked items off the shelves at random, waiting, as he so often had in London, for someone worth flirting with to pass him by. But he sound found that the aisles were bereft of anyone remotely interesting. There was no one, not even in the throng of people his own age that came tumbling in when school let out, that he thought to give a second glance to, although he certainly felt the looks that alighted on him. But no one approached him, not even the boldest looking of the girls, and he was left with the shivery feeling of cut off from everyone he passed, as though he were staring in at them all through glass.

He bought Alphard his caramels, two packets of crisps, a pair of violently pink sunglasses he’d take a picture of himself in to amuse James, and a pack of cigarettes, the thrill of their purchase dulled when he remembered that he was of age now and didn’t have to cajole the cashier into selling them to him. They were stale tasting too, barely worth the affectation of insouciance they gave him when he smoked two, leaning against the greengrocer’s wall. He might have gone for a third if a car hadn’t pulled up, the rearview mirror revealing his slouching posture as parody, like he was auditioning for the role of “bad boy” in some made for TV teen dramedy. He scowled at himself, and peeled away from the wall, became instantly lost at the thought of what to do with the remaining hours of the day, let alone the week, the month, the beginning of the following year. It was panic-making to think of all that time, to what he was supposed to do with it apart from the therapist’s vague recommendation to “regroup,” but he could not panic here, he could not lose his shit on a street corner, he could not jolt his eyes open at the pressure of a stranger’s hand on his shoulder, no matter how genuinely concerned, he would not be able to stand it.

So he beat a retreat, digging into his pockets and pulling out his earbuds for extra cover. At once, he was steadier, and when the music kicked in he was able to move, at first just circling the high street, but then turning, letting himself be led by what he was hearing. Impulse, self-destructive or otherwise, had him playing music that leaned into his mood, songs that sounded like narrow, darkened corridors, leading into fearful depths; songs like whiplash, veering in a breath from placid to panic, the singer screaming, driven past articulation; songs that cut just close enough to the nerve; songs like bloodletting. They made him run at one point, sightless, and he saw what he did whenever he dreamed: the padded van, the sterile room, the nurse supervising him when he shaved, the doctor’s conspiratorial voice as he spoke to Sirius’s mother, rendering his diagnosis like Sirius wasn’t even in the room: _I recommend conservatorship, I can start filling out the paperwork today._ Lovely, she’d said. Just lovely. And then, that moment, the one he always tried hardest to skirt away from, and so the moment he was inevitably pulled back into, when his mother stood from the chair in the doctor’s office, laid a possessive hand on his shoulder, and for the first time that he could ever recall, looked at him with a smile.

He ran, then; he stopped running now. And found, blinking his eyes of tears, that he had managed to leave the village entirely. He knew a moment of distress, but its source was so comfortingly solid, so unlike the usually amorphous things that provoked his anxiety, that it dissipated as soon as he named it: he was in the woods, and he was lost. There were trees all around him, trees as far as the eye could see – some sparse leaves still clinging to their boughs, streaks of dull red and yellow, embers of a dying fire – and yet, somehow, he could tell that people were near, that he had not gone too far, that he was in the shallows, yet. It was some quality to the light that told him that, a thinness to the shadows around him. Even still, he didn’t know which way to go.

He searched the sky, as if its smooth grayness could tell him anything, and then went for his phone, which told him, with glowing certainty, that he was already standing smack dab in the church graveyard just past Alphard’s. He thought, for a moment, of Alphard, his story about the Carrow boy (a notorious idiot), and about the ravines and wild animals, rabies on their fangs. But consideration of these things came and went like light flashing off water; it had never been his nature to heed anyone’s warnings. And so he plunged into the ubiquitous scent of the pines and the crunch of the cast-off foliage, and whether he had pointed himself in the direction of a ravine or not, or was heading straight into a maw or not, he would never know because when he reached out to run his hand along the first pine he passed he encountered not the prickle of pine needles but the dull nap of corduroy and stopped dead in his tracks.

There was a jacket in the tree. A threadbare but perfectly camouflaged forest (ha!) green jacket just hanging there, off a bough. He pulled it off and saw that it was not the only clothing tucked into the pine: there was a shirt (worn to translucence at the elbows), jeans in a ball, darned socks, and a pair of boots hanging by their laces. His first thought, because it was always his first thought, was that it wasn’t real, that he was making it up, cutting his mind free from reality’s tether. But the corduroy was so solid in his hand, the scent coming off it so solid, so _heady_ (pine, of course, but something else too, something warmer, skin and sweat and strong, strong tea) that he immediately moved on to his second conclusion: that someone had set all this up to take pictures in a desperate bid for instagram likes. He felt, then, that particular tumbling of emotions other people’s social media had the tendency to provoke in him – disdain for the other person’s pathetic bid for attention bleeding into jealousy that they might be getting it – and had just started to think, oh God, no, should _I_ take a picture of this? when a voice curled over him, as mild and sinuous as drifting fog.

“Don’t suppose I could trouble you to hand me those jeans?”

It was said so casually, so calmly, that Sirius didn’t even start to find himself suddenly not alone. He only turned, casual and calm himself, and found himself looking at a boy composed of browns and golds, his hair the mellow shade of loam, his eyes the burnished gold of a barn owl’s chest feathers. He seemed so much to belong there, part and parcel of the trees and sky, that it took Sirius a beat longer than it should have to realize he was naked.

He did give a little jump then, his gaze skating helplessly downwards before having to be dragged forcefully up again, but his voice was steady when he spoke. “Yeah, alright,” he said, handing them over, cool as can be, refusing on principle to be one-upped in nonchalance, no matter how bizarre the circumstances.

The boy, who seemed to be about his age, pulled on the jeans without bothering to turn away to try to disguise the inherent ungainliness that accompanied the action, and indeed prolonged their game of coolness-chicken by asking – as he did up his flies – “And the blue shirt too, if you please?”

Sirius handed it over, watched the way the boy’s broad shoulders rose and fell as pulled it on, mourned, more fervently than he realized, the loss of the smooth line of his collarbones when the shirt fell into place over them. _Beautiful_ , he thought, and couldn’t help his smile.

“I’m Remus, by the way,” the boy said, answering with a smile of his own. It went soft across his face, and left Sirius feeling like the air around him was brushed with warmth, the earth tilting closer to spring than fall.

“Yeah, oddly enough, that was _not_ going to my first question to you.”

Remus laughed. “So what was? Wait, can I guess? Was it…‘how on earth did you realize that there’s really only one way to get your clothes to smell perfectly pine fresh?’”

“Shit, how did you know? Oh no…you don’t mean I’m not the only one to wander into the middle of the woods taking surveys on laundry care?”

“You’re one of dozens, I’m afraid,” he answered with a grin. Then, tilting his chin back in the direction he’d come in, he cut through the charade: “There’s a natural hot spring back that way. The ground around it is all muddy and there aren’t many trees, so I leave my clothes here. There’s usually no one around, so…”

“Ah, well. Unfortunately for you, I happen to be lost.”

That spring breeze smile again. “Oh, I don’t feel so unfortunate.” A neatly placed paused then, smooth and stirring as a glissando, and if Sirius had had any doubts about the kind of conversation they were having they were gone before Remus next spoke. “But would you like some help finding your way out of here?”

Sirius bent to pick up the boots still lying beneath the tree, handing them over as he said, “Yeah, you probably should. I’d hate for you to stub your toes on my bones after some bear has picked them clean.”

“Oh,” Remus said, looking up from putting his boots on. “Bears aren’t your biggest worry in here.”

“Then what is?” Sirius asked, all coyness, thinking Remus was about to tell him some urban legend – allow them the excuse to stick _close_ together, just in case, you know, always a drop of truth in fiction – and he was all geared up to feign worry, but Remus only answered his question with another warming smile. It turned out to be needed: the wind was kicking up around them, knocking the branches together above their heads, and bringing with it the chill of incoming night.

Remus looked up, as if he could track the path the wind was taking. “You’ll have to tell me where you’re headed if you want me to help you out of here,” he said when it began to dull down to a breeze. “And…” He glanced down, a shade of sweetness now in his smile. “Your name?”

Sirius, feeling more and more entranced by the curve of Remus’s smile and the honey-shot brown of his eyes, told him both, and after Remus repeated Sirius’s name back to him in his gentle voice, he pointed them between two oaks and began to lead them through pathways of fallen leaves.

“How did you come to get lost, anyway?” Remus asked as he hopped over what had to be the smallest stream in existence. He looked back as Sirius made the tiny required jump, and gave him another smile, this one, Sirius thought, with a bit of suppressed mischief. “Were you listening to Sam the Sham _too_ ironically?”

Sirius blinked, then laughed, realizing his earbuds were still in his ears though the playlist had long since finished, and that he probably looked like one of those obnoxious assholes who wants everyone to know they own a certain brand of wireless earbuds. He pulled them out with a sheepish smile, and promptly dodged Remus’s questions, not wanting to admit to the state he’d been in before running across him, and wanting even less to admit to the fact that he did not get Remus’s reference.

“Ah, well, you know, I came out to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential –”

Remus groaned theatrically. “Oh, please,” he said, “let’s not take the walk – the very short walk! – from Thoreau’s house to Walden Pond.”

Sirius laughed. “Oh, is that the part you object to? Not that his mother brought him food and kept doing his laundry while he was living deep and sucking all the marrow out of life?”

“Ah, well, I’d be a hypocrite if that was my problem with it,” Remus said, a touch shamefacedly. “Half the reason I ever go back to my parents’ is for my mum’s gratis laundry service.”

“Oh, so what? Aren’t you like my age, eighteen? It’s not embarrassing yet for your mum to do your laundry and cook for you and –” His voice caught, snagging on what he’d been about to say: _and care for you_. Like he had any idea what a mother’s care was like. He almost actually flinched, feeling like he’d stepped on something ice cold and sharp with his naked foot. It was too early – way, _way_ too early – for him to be exposing this kind of messed up bullshit about himself to this cute, curious golden-eyed boy. And so he pivoted, awkwardly and obviously, just as Remus was turning to stare at him. “I mean, you know, it’s not like you’re writing some manifesto about living alone in the wilderness, are you?”

“Maybe I am,” Remus said, with a little smile. “Of course mine will have more to do with naked bathing and meet cutes.”

Sirius grinned, feeling his heart flutter in his chest. “Oh, are we in a meet cute? I hadn’t noticed.”

Remus scrunched up his nose, which Sirius was just realizing was likely the most adorable nose known to humankind, and grinned. “That’s part of what makes it a meet cute, you know.”

It would have hurt to restrain how widely he wanted to smile at that moment, and so he didn’t. He let it show: the bright, bubbling happiness he was suddenly overflowing with, that very-near belief that this was what they were joking it was, that the mellow gold sunlight had been slung lo through the trees just so, and that the freshly fallen leaves pleasantly crunching beneath them had all been placed there purely for them, for this moment, for them to share. So rare, this bright opposite to the usual sense of unreality that plagued him. So rare to think, _is this real?_ and for that thought to be chased with, _please let this be real_.

“And how,” Sirius asked because he had to be certain, to confirm, “did I manage to luck into such a thing?”

“D’you mean to say, ‘where have I been all your life?’” Remus said, grinning even as he went sweetly pink across his cheeks.

Sirius grinned back. “I’ll settle for just yesterday.”

“Oh? Well: on the road. I was making my way here from my parents’.”

Sirius blinked. “Do you not live here? I thought you were familiar with, ah…” He couldn’t quite bring himself to say “all these trees,” so he gestured to them instead.

“Oh, I am,” Remus said reassuringly. “But no, I don’t live here.” He paused then, his gaze scanning the trees, as if deciding which way to go. But his steps remained certain over the crunching leaves and bramble; what he was deciding had nothing to do with the path they cut through the woods. And so even before he spoke Sirius was aware of Remus’s elisions, this half in shadow portrait he was painting of himself.

“I came here,” he said, “to check in on a…well, I suppose I’d call them a family member, but they’re not, really. They’re…that probably doesn’t make any sense,” he said, with a self-conscious laugh laid as neatly beside his voice as garnish on a plate. “Sorry,” he added, with pink-cheeked contrition. “I’m being overly complicated _and_ dull.”

“No, no, you’re fine,” Sirius hastened to say. He felt bad for leading Remus down a path towards a subject he himself was unwilling to discuss yet, and wanted badly to secure them passage back to the comfortable flirtation they’d been having. “I mean, the important thing is that you made it to town to get to our meet cute on time, so –”

As he had hoped, Remus laughed and turned to face him. It felt, at once and viscerally, like whatever discomfort their conversation had been headed towards had been avoided. Even the trees around them had thinned, so that the now cloudless sky and setting sun shone through, and the air seemed touched with gold, haloing the trees, their branches, the curls of Remus’s hair. Unaware that he was gilded, Remus’s smile broadened as he said, “ _And_ I got us here.”

Only when he gestured to the trees behind him did Sirius realize he could just make out the gabled roof and ivy-freckled back of his uncle’s house through the branches, the lights downstairs just now coming on as Molly, undoubtedly, moved through the house, dressing it for night. It was an oddly and unexpectedly magical sight: the house so suddenly there, the lights in it twinkling on, just as the stars did above them. He realized then that he had expected to be led to the high street, or at the very most the churchyard, and he was impressed that Remus had managed to guide them, with only trees as navigation, right to his back door.

“Never let anyone tell you,” he said, letting his appreciation seep into his voice, “that you don’t know your way around a tree or two.”

“It’s not so hard,” Remus demurred. “I could show you.”

“Yeah?” Sirius said, turning, and putting on what he knew for a fact to be his most appealing smile. “When?”

Oh, the pleased blush that lit up along Remus’s cheeks was lovely indeed, though not as lovely as the swiftness with which he answered: “Tomorrow? Noon?”

“I’ll get lost and you come find me?”

“Sure,” Remus said, swift again, and Sirius grinned, delighting at the prospect of taking just one step into the trees behind Alphard’s house and showing just how much he wanted Remus to find him. He felt certain this was clear; he felt it as he had not felt certain of anything – even plainly real things – in a long, long time.

They said good-night still beneath the boughs of the forest’s trees, Sirius’s blood humming all the while. With someone else he would have gone for a kiss, rushed to get to the good part before his disinterest settled in; with someone else he wouldn’t have looked back as he walked away, determined to look aloof and cool to the last. But tonight, he didn’t; and he did.

In his room, where he brought his dinner so he could smile to himself in private, he could feel his blood still humming. He texted James, all caps and a dozen exclamation points, and while he waited for a text back he drew his mind over everything they’d discussed, bounding happily between each blush, each joke. When he remembered the name of the band Remus had mentioned, the one he’d joked that Sirius had gotten lost to, he searched for them on his phone. He laughed to see that one of their most popular songs was called “Little Red Riding Hood,” and then again when he played it, still in the red hoodie he’d gone out in, and heard the opening lyrics: _Hey there Little Red Riding Hood, you sure are lookin’ good_. Maybe Remus hadn’t put that much thought into it, but the delayed flirtatiousness of it was delicious to Sirius and he listened to the song over and over again.

So much so, in fact, that when he woke in the night, after another dream of the tight hallways of the hospital, and he saw through the window, half-asleep, glowing eyes looking up at him from just beyond the garden gate, he could not help but sing it to himself again: _Hey there Little Red Riding Hood, you sure are lookin’ good. You’re everything a big bad wolf could want_.

And he could have sworn – on his heart, on his eyes, on his teetering mind – that the wolf was grinning.

…

The next days were pages pulled from a storybook: each one presenting a new marvel, a slice of a life he never thought he’d be living, perfect and crisp as the air in the woods they wandered through. They were days spent with walks through the small valleys beyond the village, the newly fallen leaves pinioned to the ground by pristine, unbroken raindrops, their voices arcing high and wide around them, the first kiss they ever exchanged – Remus’s lips to the heel of Sirius’s hand, meant as teasing balm for the light scratch he’d gotten, but almost instantly transmuted into fire – releasing a small, but profound echo to bound around the valley walls. They were days spent bowed before an afternoon campfire, their worst, most ridiculous ghost stories served alongside the hot chocolate they’d heated over the flames, their hands seeking warmth in each other’s pockets, never mind the nearby flames; days kneeling in the wind blown leaves, Remus showing him which mushrooms to pull and brush from the earth, his voice soft as he named them, softer still as he brushed one, cleaned and dusted with rock salt, past Sirius’s lips; and then days of other gifts passed from palms to lips: chocolate chocolate chip cookies still oven-warm and gooey from the oven Sirius had painstakingly baked them in; a bag of roasted pumpkin seeds, sticky sweet with brown sugar and cinnamon; and a single smooth golden apple, shared, its tartness filling Sirius up like the rush of a drug, so juicy he was compelled, yes compelled, to touch his thumb below Remus’s bottom lip to wipe some away. (Remus’s tongue, brand hot against the pad of his thumb, that alone was not a gift: that was a revelation, an answer to the question of how much heat he could hold, how much wanting he could be filled with. And he had thought he knew how much already; he had thought wrong.)

Days and days like this, yes – but days only. At night, Remus would leave, slip back into the trees like so much wood smoke, and Sirius would be left with his blood singing, the scent of him cooling on his skin, to turn back to Alphard’s house and make his way alone through the night. And here at last was the trouble with those storybook-struck days – and it was not just that they ended. No, it was that just as in every tale there were flashing glances of abject strangeness. Of things he did not – could not – believe.

The wolf was one: the wolf that could not be there, because there were no wolves in these woods; the wolf that looked up into his window and met his eyes expectantly, as if they had an arrangement, as if this was a conversation they were having; the wolf that left no pawprints in the soft dirt beyond the garden wall, no matter how fast Sirius rushed out to take a picture of them once the wolf had gone; the wolf with its haunting eyes, its knowing eyes; the wolf that no one – not Alphard, not Molly, not any of their neighbors – ever seemed to see.

A dream, maybe, he tried to convince himself. A lucid, terrible dream. And he could manage, often, to knit to it that label, to set it aside for hours after he did, but this became more difficult by the night, because the wolf was only the start of the strangeness.

Little things, disconnected things, seen out of the corner of the eye, heard just above a whisper: missing pet posters tripling in the course of a weekend; a fire smoldering away in the back of the church, no one hurt, no significant damage done save to the church’s silver, now too melted and blackened to even be worth the cost of hauling away; droplets of ruby red in the leaves and smeared along a headstones of the churchyard, glinting in the increasing brownness of the landscape, heavy with the iron scent of blood; the village children refusing to go out after dark, refusing to say why; the man some people said they saw walking into the village every day around dusk, the smell of rotted meat about him; and adding up and threading through but barely there in their smudged newsprint: the maiming articles.

A man coming home from the pub the next town over; a young couple driving back from a concert in London; a boy unlatching his window to escape his parents’ arguing voices: their bodies flung, their flesh torn, their injuries so apparently devastating the papers could only describe them in euphemism. No real link between them, nothing to show that they knew each other or had anything at all in common, save for the cause of their suffering, the three word explanation embedded into each description of their maiming: “wild animal attack.”

Reasonable, perhaps, to think of the missing pets, and consider them less missing than eaten; reasonable to think, even, of _Cujo_ , red eyes, rabies, a real life horror story. Less reasonable to stand in the darkened lane moments after the wolf had vanished from it to run a flashlight over every blade of grass, waiting for a ruby droplet to wink at him; less reasonable to call to the kids bicycling to school in the gray morning light to ask what they’d seen, why they now stayed inside; less reasonable to steal into the library and run his fingers along the gummy bindings of the older books in the children’s section, their anodyne illustrations exhaling dust when he opened them to the light, frantic in a way that ran in dissonant counterpoint to the sweetly smiling cartoon creatures on the pages, the pages hot in his hands, and what he was looking for, that single, stark word, burning through him, a sudden slap. Once it was done, he could not unthink it, could not unmake the leap he took to get to it, that all too short fall down from reason to madness.

And this, then, was the storybook night: this word, this conclusion with its seductive facsimile of logic, this unnerving and persistent delusion.

_Werewolf_. The town was being attack by a werewolf.

…

He sat for three whole hours on the garden wall, the sunlight slicing through the bare-branched trees, on the day the newspaper came with news of the fourth maiming. Only this one – a girl, barely twelve, walking home late after an illicit visit to a friend to copy her homework – had died.

He lit a cigarette, but only held it in his hand, the paper crisping at its tip before burning out, unobserved. The back of his neck was damp with sweat, and he felt like he had not slept properly in days. Yesterday, the weather had turned, but in the wrong way, sticky heat flooding the forest and valley, clotting the air so thickly that the whole sky seemed fever-struck. But he was still dressed as if for proper fall, his red hoodie on and his gloves laid out on the wall beside him. He was thinking of many things as the heat gathered in closer around him: of the dead girl, of course, but of the living ones too, the group of them that had strolled up to him, bored and looking to impress each other by taking a stab at chatting him up, saying they heard he was asking about the bloody man, the one who kept them from going out at night, the one none of their parents believed they’d seen. But Alisha had photos of him, didn’t she? Look, look. And then had come Alisha, swaggering to show off for her mates, all grin and thrust out chest, shoving her phone under Sirius’s nose. Three blurry photos she had, of a man in the dark. A _naked_ man in the dark. In the thin light of the moon it was clear there was something dark around his mouth. It could have been so many things, but Sirius’s mind – and the whispering girls – made it so that it could only be one thing.

Who? he asked them, and though he hadn’t been expecting an answer – there had been so few clear answers – they all chorused in near unison: Amycus Carrow. Yes, that same Amycus Carrow who was always “young Carrow” in Alphard’s stories, the one who’d wandered into the woods not so long ago and come out screaming and scratched up, who said he’d been attacked by a monster.

Sirius followed him. It was the dreamworld logic thing to do. He expected to see nothing, to be beaten back from the threshold of this impossible idea by the tangible evidence of Carrow’s normalcy. But instead he saw him leave his house around midnight to meet a hulking, gray-bearded man in the street – _the man who came to town each night to go to the pub?_ he wrote in his notebook in a delirious scrawl – and saw them both disappear into the woods just as the blinking flash of a pair of glowing, nocturnal eyes glowed out, firefly-like and flitting, from between the trees.

_In for a penny_ , he’d thought as he’d sprinted after them into the trees. But once he was there, there was nothing, not a sound or a broken blade of grass, not a tell-tale glimmer of blood or gnawed on bone, not even the whisper of paws padding through the undergrowth. Only in the morning did something appear: the article, in the paper, saying that a girl was missing.

But what did that really mean? What did that show other than that he was capable – like every TV show conspiracy theorist – of tacking a length of string between two disparate things. One may have nothing to do with the other, and the line between them may have existed only in the warp of his own mind.

And this, of course, was another thing he thought of it while the day grew more uncomfortably warm around him, this niggling, terrible suspicion that he had crafted every connection he’d so carefully tracked, that they existed only within him, and that he was, as his mother had claimed, crazy.

He relit his cigarette and took a long drag this time, letting the smoke blow up and up into the faded blue of the sky. He wondered, for a moment, why his hands weren’t shaking the way they had been the first night he’d been in the hospital, if that was a sign that he should be more worried than he already was – or if there was something else he should be worrying about more.

He closed his eyes against this last thought, felt the way it ricocheted unimpeded inside of him, like he’d been hollowed out. He felt like he was on the verge of an anxiety attack or something bigger, and found that he could only breathe again when he heard the padding of soft footfalls behind him.

“Sirius?” Remus called out to him, and Sirius clenched his eyes closed tight before letting them open again. Without being able to see him, Remus’s voice had seemed varnished, scrubbed clean of all deeper feeling. But how could he trust what he heard? How could he trust at all?

“Sirius?” Remus called again, slinging one leg over the garden wall and sitting beside him, casually close, the hems of their trousers brushing at the ankle. “I was thinking, today, if we could stay in town that’d be great because I have to leave early. But tomorrow I’ll have more time, so we could—”

“You have no idea,” Sirius said, having hardly heard a word Remus had spoken, “how badly I want a drink right now.”

Remus blinked. “Oh…well, I mean, it’s kind of early, but I guess we could try to find tomato juice and make Bloody Marys, that could be—”

“No, I can’t have a drink. It’s just that I used to. A lot. And I would…mix in other things as well. Molly. LSD, a few times.” He paused, let out a laugh that sounded wrong to his own ears. “Alright. More than a few times.”

He felt Remus shift next to him, drawing closer so that their knees were flush, a comforting press. He didn’t say anything, but Sirius could feel him _listening_. Such a rare thing, that: someone who does more than just hear what you say. Such a rare, intoxicating thing.

“I got worse about it when I graduated early from school. I’d done this accelerated track thing, and once that was done and I’d gotten accepted to uni there was just…so much time. And I didn’t – I _couldn’t_ – spend any of that time at home. So I’d go out. Anywhere I could find, anything I could take. Anything to eat up the hours until I could finally _leave_ that fucking house. So: a lot of drinking, a lot of drugs, and _a lot_ of tripping. Long trips, too. Ones that would last whole nights and days. Like, I could go to sleep, wake up, and not know that I wasn’t still dreaming. That’s…that’s probably where the line first started to blur for me. Between real and…” He made a gesture with his hand, a closed fist opening out to cup emptiness, air. He had always found them so inadequate, the words used to describe the sense of unreality that had permeated him; even the diagnostic words felt like euphemism. So he let silence stand for the way colors had whispered to him, for how a blade of grass set on fire had made such perfect, singing sense, for how the pixels on his phone screen had grown porous, had sucked in light rather than emitting it. Everything metaphorical until, abruptly, it wasn’t.

“So I’m in a bad way, obviously. Seeing abstract shapes appear in mid-air in front of me, things I thought were part of an alphabet only I could read, starting to convince myself of some grade A conspiracy theorist shit, my mates are getting pretty openly worried for me, trying to take me to rehab, trying to get me to stop, and just as I’m starting to think, oh, hey, maybe I do have a problem, my mother decides…she wanted to –”

His breath caught; he could half-see it all out in the hazy sky, almost. A part of him wished Remus could see it too, so that he wouldn’t have to say it, wouldn’t have to explain what it was like to wake to her shadow on the wall contorting towards him, her expression all cool composure, not a hair out of place as she gestured to the broken glass around his bed, the dried blood on his wrists, her voice falling over him like a veil, whispering, _Sirius…what have you done?_

He exhaled in a rasp, his hands squeezing tight around his scarred up wrists. He realized he could only say it if his eyes were closed, his view reduced to blackness.

“My mother,” he said, “dosed me with more LCD, and convinced me I was crazy. She told me I tried to kill myself while talking in gibberish, and had me committed.”

He heard Remus’s sharp intake of breath, and could not help the swell of overwhelming anger he felt at the sound of it. It was undeserved, he knew it, but then James hadn’t deserved his anger either. Dear James, who refused to believe Sirius would try to kill himself, who had gotten his parents to finagle him a visit to Sirius in the hospital, who had taken one look at his wrists and said, look at the tilt, this was done by someone left-handed. Who knew that alone in Sirius’s family, only his mother was left-handed.

He had gotten Sirius a lawyer, helped him get emancipated. And Sirius had repaid him by getting into shouting matches with him and running away the first chance he’d gotten.

“Sirius,” Remus breathed now, drawing Sirius back to the present, “God, I’m—”

“Save it,” Sirius said sharply, because he thought he wouldn’t be able to stand it if he heard anything pitying. It was bad enough that he had to force himself to keep speaking.

“It’s honestly _amazing_ ,” he managed to spit out, “how easy it is for someone to get you to doubt your own mind. And once that doubt is there –” He shook his head brusquely, turning away from Remus, putting him back in his peripheral vision. “It never really goes away. And…and maybe it needs to be. Maybe there is something truly cracked in me. I mean, I – I’ve been collecting evidence for all this totally unrelated shit going on in town and my big conclusion to everything is – wait for it – _werewolves_. There are werewolves in the village killing animals and maiming people. A big man – I don’t know his name – and this kid, Carrow. Both of them: werewolves. I fucking followed them –”

“You did _what_?” Remus snapped out, his normally smooth voice as disturbed as the surface of a pond tossed with rain.

“Oh, I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet!” Sirius declared, rounding on Remus, who, he saw, had gone completely rigid beside him. He could feel that he was smiling too widely, knew that he was torpedoing the one good thing that had happened to him, and still he couldn’t stop. Indeed, he leaned in closer, and forced himself into Remus’s space as he said it: “Here it is: I think you put me up to it.”

Remus blinked slowly. “What –”

“You put the idea in my head,” Sirius said slowly, clearly. “From the first day we met. All those cryptic comments about there being worse things in the woods, that you were walking around naked because you were in a hot spring – _there’s no fucking hot springs in these woods_! And – oh God! – Sam the Sham! That’s hands down the best part, your little coup de grace! Namedropping a song about a werewolf without naming the song, that’s brilliant, Remus, really it is. I don’t know if you knew about me somehow or you just thought it’d be funny to mess with me or what, but –”

“I have to go,” Remus said, already on his feet. He was staring down at Sirius, his gaze steady, but his face almost drained of color and his hands clenched into fists at his sides. A part of Sirius almost felt impressed: he’d always imagined Remus recoiling from him far more viscerally.

“So soon?” Sirius snapped out. He couldn’t stifle a helpless little laugh. “Oh no, have I done something to put you off?”

“ _You followed them_ ,” Remus snapped back, some of his composure cracking at last. “You followed Greyback and –”

“So you know them!” Sirius exclaimed, triumphant. “You set this up with them! Run me through the planning, please, I’ve just got to kno—”

“If you followed Fenrir Greyback then he knows it. And if you asked questions about him, if you drew attention to him, then you are not safe, you need to—”

“Are you really trying this still? After everything I just told you?” Sirius was on his feet now too, and he could hear all the hurt he’d been trying to shove aside making its way into his voice. He could see it, too, where it was reflected on Remus’s face, his jaw tensing and his eyes flicking back and forth between Sirius and the house behind him, as if he couldn’t bear to look at Sirius for too long. His lips trembled when he managed to meet Sirius’s eyes, and when he parted them Sirius waited to hear it: the apology, or at least the explanation. Or – and it was still so terribly, terribly possible – to hear Remus’s voice go soft and patronizing as he told him that this was all just in his head.

But instead, all he said, his body already turned toward the forest, was, “Silver. Get silver.”

And then he was away, running off into the trees, gone before Sirius could even properly scream at him, or ask the one question that had been burning through the back of his tongue, burning through him, corrosive as acid.

_Tell me_ , he’d been unable to ask. _Please. Were_ we _real?_

…

It was full dark when he peeled himself up from the corner of the bed he’d been curled up on, and it felt like a dive through molasses just to get into a sitting position, his body resisting every effort to go upright. Sitting, he felt like one of the leaves that had caught in the fire he’d set in the garden: poised to curl in on himself and crack into flakes of ash. It didn’t help that the smell of smoke still hung heavily on him; he’d stood there after feeding the fire every delirious note he’d made, every newspaper clipping or stray line, the smoke fanning out and onto him for long minutes, clogging the air of the already too-heady day. He had had many thoughts about what he would do after the fire burned itself to ash, some so self-destructively horrible that he – even then – recoiled from the thought of them. He knew he would have to do something, but the thought of having to decide was enough that he could hardly keep standing, and he had had to stagger his way back to the house, pulling himself up the stairs with his hands on the banister like an old man. He had managed, before collapsing on the bed, to send a text to James, and he looked now to see if it had been answered. But when he went to turn on his phone all it showed him was inky blackness, and he realized the battery was dead.

He had to laugh. What a shitty day; what a shitty life. He very nearly bowed back onto the bed, another wave of tears in his throat, but his need to see if James had called him was stronger than his desire to fold in on himself, and he pushed himself to his feet, walking creakily about the room, searching for his charger, until he remembered that he had left it on the breakfast table. Unable to spare the energy for even the slightest of aggravated sighs he shambled to the bedroom door, and back downstairs. At the table, his phone plugged in and performing its irritating routine of refusing to show him anything until it had charged to five percent, he noticed a piece of stationary laid over a table place setting. _Sirius_ , it read in Alphard’s scrawl, _will be out tonight, visiting Mrs. Figg_.

“Great,” Sirius said aloud, flinging the note away from him. So now on top of everything else he was thinking about his uncle getting laid. He felt his nerves fraying more and more by the second, every little creak and groan the house made pressing in, scratching at him, making him want to scream to fill up the silence. And it was in this state, his knuckles whitening, his teeth grinding to keep the sound of his own voice in, that the front doorbell rang.

There was a part of him, the helplessly hopeful part, that thought _James_. It could have been. There was just enough time from when Sirius texted him to now for him to make it here, if he’d caught the trains at just the right times. He could be there, on the other side of that door, a physical embodiment of the fact that there had been good in Sirius’s life, and that there might be good again.

But the body always knows better. Sweat slicking palms, hair standing on end, heartbeat like a cannonade, he went to the door as zebras are driven to dive into crocodile-infested rivers. It was almost an imperative, even as his hand landed on the knob and he had his first conscious presentiment that he might not want to see who was on the other side. But by the time this thought had fully registered the door was already open and he could see the two men – one slight, one hulking – standing there.

They were a Rorschach test, shapes his mind picked out of the darkness, impossible that they could really be there, that it could really be the two of them, Carrow and Greyback, standing shoulder to shoulder on the doorstep. And yet he could hear them, their breaths heavy in the pressing heat of the night, and he could see the subtle movements in the muscles of their faces, lit stark by the light of the nearly full moon.

“Wow,” he said, once the shock of the blow had passed. “Remus is really fucking dedicated to this, huh?”

“Who the hell is Remus?” said Carrow, sounding convincingly confused.

“The other one who came to talk to you,” Greyback said to Carrow. His voice was low, more feeling than sound, a rumble that reached through Sirius’s core and reminded him, unavoidably, of a wolf’s growl. “The one who thinks you don’t deserve to eat.”

Carrow made a dismissive noise and Sirius, a flare of panic going through him, gripped the doorknob tightly and made to close it. “Well, since you don’t know him—”

Greyback braced a hand against the door, and pushed it easily out of Sirius’s grip. Behind him, Carrow sneered. “Nice try, Black. But you already screwed yourself when you started snooping—”

“Amycus,” Greyback rumbled. “What have I told you? Now that you’re a wolf you don’t need to explain yourself to these people anymore.”

“Don’t you think this is all going a little too far?” Sirius said. He was trying for irritated even as his eyes darted around the doorway and the two men standing beyond it, his gaze landing finally in the sky, on the moon. It was a day shy of full, and the sight it quenched his panic, though it was ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous that it would.

He must have let out a sigh all the same, because Greyback followed his gaze, and chuffed out a laugh as stepped into the house. “Sorry, kid,” he said, his voice somehow deepening. “That’s not how it works.”

“Oh, please, enou—”

Greyback was in his face, his hand at Sirius’s throat. With one hand he lifted him up off the floor, and with only a smile as warning, tossed him bodily across the room.

He landed hard at the foot of the sitting room sofa, rocking it so badly that knickknacks on the table next to it rained down on the floor around him, the clatter all he could hear as his breath left his lungs in a gasp and his vision swam, the room a heady haze of colors, the only moving objects two dark, contorting blurs. Then he heard a loud crunching, as though his ears were clogged and he was hearing the grinding of his own teeth, bone shaving bone, only a hundred times louder, and then a wet, ugly snap and a low, purring growl. Then he made out, through his still swimming vision, four glowing points in the otherwise dim space beyond him – four glowing points that were growing closer.

He was almost relieved. Whatever was going on with him – whether it was real or imagined – the time for worrying and dwelling and wondering over it was done. Now, at last, something would _happen_.

He could see them clearly now, the wolves. He could even tell them apart. Greyback, larger than the sofa Sirius had fallen against, shoved Carrow, slight and mangy-coated, forward. Sirius could practically hear in the gesture, _Kill this one right for a change_.

Carrow responded to Greyback’s order with haste, leaping towards Sirius muzzle and claws first – but no matter. The toppled side table had deposited a candlestick – heavy, ornate, and made of pure silver – right by Sirius’s hand.

He brought it up just as Carrow leapt down and when it landed across the side of Carrow’s open jaw he learned what a wolf’s scream sounded like. It was otherworldly and oddly dense, as though it were happening in chorus.

But then, Sirius saw that it was. Because behind the writhing Carrow, Greyback was also flat on the floor, held there by the jaws of a third wolf.

No time for questions; no space for doubt. Carrow was already back on his feet and Sirius felt to his marrow how bad it would be if he got those teeth in him. Unfortunately, however, for Carrow, the sitting room, the dining room, and indeed the whole house were absolutely riddled with silver.

Even later, when it was memory, Sirius couldn’t pick out the individual moments of what followed. There was only his iron grip on the candlestick in his right hand, his left throwing whatever other silver bric-a-brac he found as he was chased in increasingly tight loops through the house, and the way the silver hissed and burned scores of Carrow’s fur and skin away wherever it hit, which was often. Of the other fight happening in the house, Sirius only ever saw demolition it left behind: shattered chairs and china, a wolf-sized dent punched through the wall, and blood, great spills of it, elliptical and arcing out the door. He couldn’t even remember the moment Carrow ran off, only the sound of the cut-off howl that prompted it.

How easy, then, with such hazy recollections, to have felt that he’d lost more of himself than he’d thought. How likely to feel forever broken by such a profound, violent delusion. He could feel himself tipping into it, even in that moment, looking around at the splashes of blood with no origin, the tables and chairs he could have smashed on his own.

But then, there came a noise, less than a whisper, and the sound of the wind blowing through the still open door. And there, moving slowly, clearly injured, was the third wolf. _His_ wolf.

Smoke gray fur, knowing eyes, passing by his bedroom window nearly every night, cheeky, almost, he saw now. Like a boy hoping for a glimpse of his crush. Like a boy who’d tried to tell someone they were a werewolf by obliquely referencing a song.

He laughed, but it was genuine, tear-choked. And then with his heart in his throat, he was finally able to reach past every doubt, and whisper to the wolf, so solid before him, “Remus?”

No words for an answer. No words could compare to what he did, to how he showed himself, peeled himself almost literally back, a revelation of muscle, of bone, of skin. It was like staring into the shoals of a warm-water bay, watching them light up with bioluminescent algae: it was that startlingly awe-inspiring, and that matter-of-fact.

When it was done he was breathing heavily, sweat darkening his hair, and shivering from the exertion of it. Sirius felt much the same: changed.

“I’m sorry,” Remus breathed. “I’m sorry, I wanted to tell you—”

He cut himself off, startled as Sirius touched a hand to his cheek. “It was real,” Sirius said, and it was not a question. “We were real.”

“We _are_ real,” Remus rasped back. “If you still want—”

“Yes,” Sirius whispered, delighted with the wild, heady smell of him, the fierce heat of his skin. “I want.”

And there, despite the blood and the bruising and the shards of broken things around them, and the work still to come, he held Remus close, and brushed their lips together, the both of them deepening into a kiss, warm and insistent and true.

**Author's Note:**

> Some quotes/lines taken from _Walden_ by Henry David Thoreau, and the song "Little Red Riding Hood" by Sam the Sham.
> 
> *  
>  **Mod Note**
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